A wildfire roaring along the mountains above Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley and the towns of La Canada-Flintridge and Pasadena has been taking out houses, taxing firefighters, forcing evacuations and, in the roasting bargain, threatening two of the nation’s premier and historic science facilities. At the top of Mount Wilson is the observatory where George Ellery Hale built the 60- and 100-inch telescopes that made him famous (with other telescopes now up there too), and at the bottom is the venerable Jet Propulsion Laboratory now run by NASA.

   Several outlets have noted these facility’s in their reports. One excellent one, focussed on the observatory and with info on JPL, is at the New Scientist site. Its Maggie McKee and Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope wrote it, expertly. Beatty also is blogging away at the S&T site.

Other Stories:

• Pasadena Star-News: Station fire within half mile of Mt. Wilson communications equipment; TV towers are up there, too.
• LA Times – Corina Knoll, Hector Becerra: TV, cellphone signals from Mt. Wilson at risk / Observaotry’s home is also a major communications hub ;  For some reason it calls the place a “historic solar observatory,” which is only part of what it has. Oh well, the observatory may be the cultural jewel up there, but the cell phones and TV signals – that’s what people would notice. The stress in the news judgment is unavoidable.
• *UPDATE (Sept 2) – Regrettably The Tracker missed the Times‘s sidebar on Mount Wilson’s Observatory, by John Johnson Jr: and it’s a good review for readers of what’s at stake should flames enter the complex: Mt. Wilson Observatory: Center of scientific breakthroughs.

Grist for the Mill: Mount Wilson Observatory Fire News ;

-CP

A few outlets in Britain are reporting a locally-designed space vehicle able to thwart asteroids that have destination Earth on their itineraries. They would get nudged off course just enough to miss. Two outlets that the Tracker sees covering this news also miss. The idea comes from the UK firm EADS Atrium (error note- misspelled that company on first try). Lost is an opportunity to explain in simple terms exactly how this thing would work. 

   The Telegraph‘s Richard Gray gets the essence down: The ten-tonne spacecraft would park itself about 50 yards (or meters, take your pick) from the hurtling rock a decade or two before its date with our planet. Its gravity would apply a teeny force on the asteroid. Oonches with its ion thrusters would prevent the two from merging. So this tiny dog would, on a feeble gravitational leash, slowly pull the asteroid off course. But where is the scale of forces to illustrate for readers how little it would take? One could calculate how much the probe would “weigh” on the asteroid, which is about the same as what its force on it would be as it hovers nearby. Gray has a good deal of general context. But, alas, the story says at one point that the “gravity tractor changes the angle it (the asteroid) is travelling in by a fraction of an inch over a period of 15 years…” The eyes glaze. The jaw drops. What kind of angle is measured in inches? Look, it almost imperceptibly changes the orbit’s vector by a cumulative fraction of a degree – and it would be worth knowing how large a fraction. That in turn would, on a path length of billions of miles of travel, subtend thousands of miles displacement after 20 years. Sure catastrophe become near miss. The real numbers ought to add up nicely and comprehensibly. Let’s see them, not jibberish about an angle of a fraction of an inch.

   The BBC has it, too, with similarly little detail - although no boners about the metrics of an angle. It also acknowledges that the general concept has been around for quite awhile.

Other Asteroid deflection news:

• Florida Today – John Kelly (blog): Asteroid Mission Getting Attention; This is the idea, in lieu of sending people back to the Moon or to Mars, to send a NASA crew to a passing asteroid and assess what kind of way to alter one’s trajectory might be most suitable.

NASA NEWS NOTE: The independent review panel that has spent month’s assessing the space agency’s abilities and budgets released its report today. The Tracker will attempt tomorrow morning a roundup on the expected, heavy coverage it will get over the course of the day.

-CP  

The AP‘s Arctic-roaming Charles J. Hanley posts today from Canada’s Mackenzie River Delta way up in the Northwest Territories. He stands by a boggy lake a-fizz with methane. Park your boat next to one of the bubbling seeps. Light a match and toss it at the water and you’ll set it ablaze, he writes (and one wonders about the peril to inflatable rubber boats in such a case). The vignette is backed by a solid rundown of reports from around the world. He reports on teams of scientists hard at work. The questions are many – how much methane has been bubbling up here all along? Is a calamitous acceleration underway? As permafrost’s organic matter decomposes, what share of the emission will be CO2, and what share methane? How much will be from hydrates, and how much from bacteria consuming thawing vegetation?

    It is, he writes, a “possible planetary threat.” Terrifying scenarios are rife. Certainty is not. This is scary but so laden with ifs and maybes it is no exercise in sensationalism. But it is serious, with closing quotesthat provide no relief from worry.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Earth System Research Lab Press Release ;

Pic: Russia, source ;

-CP

It has no byline – it just says “staff” did it - and a tag notes that wire services contributed to it. But the ABC swine flu team did a good job of knitting together a tough, skeptical story over the weekend under the hed, “Doctors Question WHO’s Severe Swine Flu Warning.” It is as good a reflection as any of the anxiety and uncertainty among doctors, policy makers, and potential patients alike over the crunch time that may be upon us all. Also on ABC’s wire, a piece by Patrik Jonsson: In a Flu Pandemic, What Can the Government Do to You? That’s not for you, but to you. The piece has it both ways – raising, sort of, a vision of something like martial law and referring to some outlandish conspiracy theories of vaccination at gun point – while dwelling also on more routine public health measures.  

This Tracker (CP) hasn’t paid much attention to H1N1 for awhile, and new medical Tracker (PR) is off for a short while this week. But the seasons are changing, vaccine supplies are still mostly hypothetical, and speculation will soon get tested by reality when it comes to the pandemic’s forecast, Northern Hemisphere bloom this fall and winter. It cannot be ignored.

To reflect the immense size and scope of press coverage, here is a partial roundup – not terribly well organized, but aimed at showing a variety of outlets, topics, and locations:

Some US stories:

• AP – Lauran Neergaard: Return of Swine Flu: What’s Ahead for Americans? ; Neergaard displays a sure hand and she compresses lots of news here – fresh, old, good, bad, and sideways.
• Boston Globe – Stephen Smith: Back to flu / With schools opening, it’s time to prepare for swinte strain that targets the young ; Slick vignette – it opens on a top flu expert who also has some kids to worry about.
• Washington Post – Carol Morello: Swine Flu Strategy: Preparation, Not Panic ;
• Sun News – Adva Saldinger (S. Carolina) : First swine flu death in S.C. ;
• Daily Record (New Jersey) – Tehani Schneider : Swine flu looms, Morris prepares ; A small outlet on its local officials, their plans, and a “nightmarish possible scenario.”
• Durango Herald – Guy Walton : Learning from (flu) experience ; Another little paper’s effort to wrap arms around this – it is serious, or the “viral equivalent of Y2K”?
• Bloomberg – Meg Tirrell, Tom Randall: Sorority Rush, Football Practices Spur College Swine Flu season ; The story is long, heavily reported, and not at all as trivial as the hed might suggest.

Stories from All Over:

• THANHNIEM News Service: Vietnam records 157 more swine flu cases ;
• AP – Eliane Engeler: WHO says swine flu down in Southern Hemisphere;
• AP – Vivian Sequera: Colombian president comes down with the swine flu; And other nations’ leaders advised to watch whose hands their shaking ;
• Pravda: Two presidents infected with swine flu ; Costa Rica’s leader too;
• Bloomberg – Anastasia Ustinova: Russia Prepares to Vaccinate 100 Million People ;
• Press Trust of India: 23 more test positive for swine flu in Delhi ;
• New Zealand Herald: Another NZer dies from swine flu ; Toll is now 17 ;
• Gulf Times : Iran restricts Haj pilgrims ;
• So. Africa Health24: Severe form of swine flu reported ; This is the WHO report that this posts first link, to ABC, addresses.

-CP 

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) One of the best Spanish language health sections report that there is more than a simple correlation between erectile dysfunction and heart disease. The first paragraph lists impotence as a risk factor like diabetes, tobacco or cholesterol. In the lead it even says that the dysfunction increases 26% the mortality due to cancer or other non-heart related reasons. Of course there is no mechanism explaining how impotence damages the body and the cardiovascular system. The tracker checked the abstract of the original paper. It only talks about association, not cause and effect.

En un artículo del periódico con quizás la mejor sección de salud que existe, parece haberse producido un despiste tan tópico, que el rastreador duda de haber malinterpretado la nota de Patricia Matey sobre la relación entre disfunción eréctil y enfermedad de corazón.

Todos entendemos que la impotencia puede ser un síntoma de que algo no funciona bien en nuestro cuerpo, y que de padecerla deberíamos consultar al doctor para comprobar que no esconda algún problema de salud más serio.

Esto es lo que explica el artículo de El Mundo, a partir de un estudio prospectivo con 1.709 hombres de 40 a 70 años según el cual “los varones con disfunción eréctil tienen un 43% más de riesgo de morir del corazón”, y “eleva también en un 26% las posibilidades de fallecer de cáncer u otras causas”. ¿Eleva? ¿qué quiere decir eleva? ¿la impotencia causa cáncer? “Claro que no, no seas tan meticuloso ni malinterpretes lo que pretende transmitir el artículo”, podéis pensar. Pero resulta que en el primer párrafo se puede leer: “La impotencia tendría que considerarse un factor de riesgo de enfermedad cardiovascular al igual que lo son los tradicionales colesterol, tabaquismo o diabetes. El motivo: eleva, según un nuevo estudio, la mortalidad por todas las causas, especialmente cardiacas”.

Un momento… el colesterol bloquea arterias, en la diabetes se da un aumento de azúcar en sangre que daña los vasos sanguíneos, y el tabaco endurece las arterias, provoca trombosis y acelera al corazón. ¿qué efectos sobre el organismo genera la disfunción eréctil? Puede ser una señal de alarma, o poner de manifiesto problemas ocultos de circulación, pero en todo caso es una consecuencia y no una causa como el artículo transmite al lector.

El tracker reconoce que a medida que el texto avanza, se incide sólo en la impotencia como una señal de atención para la vigilancia de la salud, pero el lector ya se ha quedado con el mensaje de que la disfunción eréctil es un factor de riesgo en sí misma, y eleva la enfermedad cardiaca e incluso cánceres. Si efectivamente es así y el tracker no lo ha entendido, pide disculpas por adelantado y solicita al articulo que de más detalles para clarificar el proceso.

En esta ocasión, incluso ha recurrido al paper original, en el abstract del cual sólo se habla de asociación.

Esta noticia es de hoy mismo, y por el tema que trata, bien podría ser que se reflejara en otros medios de comunicación. Será interesante ver con qué ángulo la tratan otros periodistas especializados.

- PE

Why so little ink for a fascinating, if incomplete and tentative, report in last week’s Science on a plausible way that tiny variations in solar output leave a big imprint in Earth’s weather patterns? Neither AP nor  NYTimes (perhaps tomorrow in ScienceTimes?) did it. The reliable science news masticators in the UK, hardly a jot. The Tracker finds this curious.  The report, by scientists at the U.S.’s Nat’l Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado and others who sicced a supercomputer double-team on the problem, is deliciously cross-grained to the climatology-political mainstream’s attitude toward solar cycles and climate change. While greenhouse skeptics, including some bona fide scientists if not exactly climatologists such as Sallie Baliunis and the late Robert Jastrow, have argued that solar cycles and not SUVs and coal combustion explain the last century’s warming, most researchers dismissed the effects as statistically implausible in theory and insignificant in reality.

    The report in Science does not, by the way, vindicate such skeptics’ primary arguments that human-related greenhouse gases have  little to do with long term climate change. We still need to hope with double-crossed fingers that the upcoming IPCC Copenhagen meeting does something muscular.  But it does find ways that the jigs and jags in weather statistics – regardless of what the baseline’s trend is – might be very sensitive to solar output and its sunspot indicators. Data already show something is going on, but it lacked explanation. The new efforts suggests how ocean surface and stratospheric impact, small in themselves, might feed back on one another to impose large shifts in wind, rain, and temperature patterns. That is, um, interesting. It does little to reinforce anybody’s preferred paradigm in the political wranglings over climate policy, but so?  Within the pages of Science, its own news team – via Richard Kerr – wrote it nicely and in perspective. But not much else ran.

    But, some took the hook:

• Reuters – Dave Fogarty, filing from Singapore: Study shines light on sunspot-climate link: The focus is on monsoons and solar output, and the possibility of better, multi-year forecasts. He reports nothing about the study’s pertinence to global warming. Why not, even if the answer is that it has none that matters?
• Live Science staff (no byline): Sun’s Cycle Alters Earth’s Climate ;

Grist for the Mill: NCAR Press Release ;

And just for the orneriness of it: Canada’s Conservative Free Press has a guest column by one of the most steadfast soldiers in the Anthropogenic Climate Change is Crap camp, Fred Singer:  Sun spot frequency has an unexpectedly strong influence on cloud formation and precipitation ; And that, says Singer, is just the tip of the iceberg.

*UPDATE: Sci Am’s David Biello let me know there were a few more stories on the report. Had I a better-buffed set of search engines I might have been less ruffled and am chastened. David provides three links:

• Scientific American – David Biello: How Sunlight Controls Climate / New computer models begin to suggest how changes in the sun’s strength might change weather patterns; The hed is delightfully careful : “begin to sugggest how… might change …” etc. It’s a good job – and explicit in saying that however the effect really works, it does not appear able to explain away anthropogenic global warming.
• Christian Science Monitor – Moises Valesquez-Manoff: One sunspot mystery solved, researchers say ; The hed is a bit stark, the story has plenty on the caveats and doubts by colleagues. And, it also says, this short term interaction is not enough to explain long term trends.
• NatureNews – Geoff Brumfiel: Sunspots stir oceans / Variations in the Sun’s brightness may have a big role in Pacific precipitation ; Link goes to a brief summary, with the whole available to subscribers and others registered for access at Nature Publishing.

-CP

The best investigative health story I’ve read in a long time appeared Sunday on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Nothing I could say would do it justice. Read it.

Gerry Marzaroti, the editor of the New York Times Magazine, has, however, distracted attention from the substance and gravity of the piece by claiming on The New York Times website that the story cost $400,000 to produce.

The skinback began almost immediately. No, he said, that was wrong; he had meant to say that’s what it would have cost if Times staffers had written it. He continued: “My point, really, is simply this: Investigative reporting is very, very expensive.”

He’s right; it is. But not quite as expensive as he’d like to make it. The Nieman Journalism Blog, which reported Marzorati’s admission of error, worked out the economics a little more carefully.

It’s too complicated to report here, but here’s one central fact: The Times didn’t pay anything for this story. It was largely supported by foundations, and the unpaid work of the determined and dedicated reporter, Sheri Fink. (Disclosure: she’s a friend of mine and a colleague in a writers’ group.)

It wasn’t money that gave birth to this story; it was Fink’s determination, both in her reporting, and in seeking the financial support she needed to get it done.

It’s nice to have outlets such as The New York Times and others with big wallets to support investigative reporting. And the Times deserves credit for featuring this piece so prominently. But the crucial component of investigative reporting isn’t money; it’s a dedicated, talented, and dogged investigator.

The old media may be gradually disappearing, but investigative reporting does not have to disappear with it.

- Paul Raeburn

It’s become a science writers’ meme: After decades of research and billions of dollars, we have lost the war on cancer.

The latest iteration came Friday in The New York Times, where Gina Kolata and Lawrence Altman remind us that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was a prime mover behind the war on cancer. But, they lament, his “fate was not much changed by the cancer war. Despite billions that have been spent, the death rate from most cancers barely budged.”

Kolata wrote much the same thing about the war on cancer in a series of articles in April. Sharon Begley said so in Newsweek last year. It’s been widely reported elsewhere, too. Journalists agree: we lost the war.

I’m not so sure. Here’s one thought: Is the death rate the only criterion by which to judge the success of the war on cancer?

Researchers waging the war on cancer have assembled vast archives of knowledge of cell biology, cancer genetics, metastasis, virology–research of great potential value. Much of it might not be curing cancer now, but it counts for something.

And maybe length of survival counts for something, too. Kolata and Altman say lower down in their piece that the survival rate for people with Kennedy’s illness (glioblastoma) “has more than tripled in the past 40 years, from about four and a half months to 14 or 15 months today.” Kennedy managed to live about 15 months after his diagnosis. The war on cancer gave him an extra year of life. Is that a win or a loss?

And here’s another thought: Maybe we shouldn’t be so sure that cancer rates have “barely budged,” as the Times reports. Maybe that meme, something we’re so sure is true that maybe we don’t bother to check, ought to be discarded.

In mid-August, many news outlets reported that cancer death rates are falling.

From Bill Hendrick of WebMD:

“Death rates from cancer have been decreasing in all age groups in recent years, but the steepest declines have been among younger people, a new study shows.”

The same trend was noted in news stories in May, prompted by an American Cancer Society report. Again, from WebMD:

“The report shows a 19% drop in men’s overall cancer death rates between 1990 and 2005 and a decline of about 11% in women’s overall cancer death rates between 1991 and 2005.”

I don’t know whether we’ve won or lost the war on cancer. But reporters who argue a position ought to be sure they’ve reviewed all the evidence.

- Paul Raeburn

The LATimes‘s  Karen Kaplan, The Tracker is late to note, performed a public service via heavy reporting earlier this week.  Under the hed, “Calls to tax junk food gain ground,” she dove deep into the idea that slapping a surcharge on sugar-laden sodas or other obesity-fostering foods might be a good idea. It might, proponents argue, be as effective as cigarette taxes are against smoking.

    But not so fast, Kaplan suggests. And she goes well beyond the thickets of free-market and nanny-state-citing political opposition such a move would entail. Rather, with citations of studies galore, her story strongly suggests that it won’t work. People will turn to consuming fat, rather than sugar. It will be impossible to sort through the relative merits of naturally sweet fruit juices versus colas. And then there are sports drinks. And if you tax doughnuts, why not blueberry muffins?  This is fact-based (or, at least, plausible research results-based) reporting.

   But, she notes, public support for such a thing is growing.

-CP

One just knows that, with nearly every move in every laboratory in the world noted in computer records and emails and prepublication sites, not to mention tweets and gigabytes of raw on server data banks, in principle the progress of science has never been as well recorded as now.

     That’s in principle. The WS Journal’s Robert Lee Hotz describes in his column today the actual nightmare of overload, of constantly changing software to read it, of  deteriorating media from reel-to-reel tapes to thumbdrives, and of barely-searchable oceans of info in twitter, YouTube, FAcebook, email, and other varieties of what some call eManuscripts.  He writes the paradox this way: Never have so many people generated so much digital data or been able to lose so much of it so quickly. This site had a post not long ago on news of the heroic effort it took to find software able to revive some of the original, high-res photos by US spacecraft as they circled the Moon in the Sixties. That, it seems, was just a hint of what is happening to the non-paper trail of science and technology all over the world. Just think: What would YOU do with a floppy disk that may once have run on your rich, late uncle’s Commodore 64 or Osborne 1 and you just pulled from where it was hidden under a dusty file drawer and is labelled only, “Vital: Don’t destroy!”

   As Hotz observes, this ephemeral Everest of data and its fragility has been a hot topic among curators, archivists, and historians for a decade or more. But it is getting worse. Not only are the software and other conventions for reading data changing all the time, but now some machines, like the LHC project, generate information so fast there is hardly any way to store it all … at all. He offers some hope – a digital device that in theory will hold data for a billion years. Hope the reader lasts that long.

-CP

What an army of scientists, led by authors at the National Institute of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute, turned out to find out the genetic foundation for the varieties of dog fur. It reveals in today’s Science that variations in just three genes control the seven recognized categories of their pelts, sorted by combinations of length, softness, and curliness.  Twenty authors from seven institutions in all ran genome-wide association studies on 1000 dogs from 80 breeds. The three genes that popped out shows it doesn’t take many variables  to produce bewildering variety in phenotype.

Okay, fine, and The Tracker is utterly willing to endorse this project as worth pursuit, but it  may not have been cheap. Given the propensity of a few doofus lawmakers to make loud,  low-brow fun of federal science agencies for work that looks kind of superfluous on the surface, why exactly were taxpayer dollars spent on this? Had it been the American Kennel Club paying for it, that’s make sense. And there probably is good reason for the public as a whole to put up most of the bill. But…what is it? Let’s see how many reporters ask that one.The first funders listed are the NIH and NSF, followed by Nestle Purina (that makes good sense) and a few others. Plus, many dog owners volunteered tissue samples from their four-footed darlings.

Working our way through the usual suspects, the New York Times‘s Henry Fountain implies a reason - to demonstrate that complex results don’t require myriad causes – but that’s it. At AAAS’s own ScienceNow, Elizabeth Pennisi reports 100 dachsunds’ genes went into the gene-sorting stew. And 76 Portuguese water dogs. But she doesn’t quite answer why dogs were a logical place to do this sort of study.

And then….

BEST OF SHOW SO FAR: At AP, Randolph E. Schmid – Eureka! – hits the nail on the head. Or scratches the wiener dog on the ear, whatever.  He writes in the second graf, quoting a lead author, “What’s important for human health is the way we found the genes involved….rather than the genes themselves.” Thank you Mr. Schmid. And now, onward.

Other stories (with a yes, no, or sort-of on the why-did-the-gov’t-do-this question):

• Scientific American (podcast) Karen Hopkins: Fido’s Fur Fated by 3 Genes ; No.
• Telegraph (UK) : Three genes decide how a dog’s fur looks ; Yes.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Genes that mix rough with the smooth in dogs may help fight human disease ; Yes, and sort of (that is, it’s not THESE genes that are at all likely to help fight human genes, but the technique that found them. His story gets it right – the hed takes a short cut) ;
• HealthDay News : Benji, Marley, or Bo: three Genes Dictate Dog’s Coat ; Sort of.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: Bad hair day? Dogs can blame genes ; No.
• Independent/Press Association (UK) John von Radowitz:  Hair of the dog excites scientists ; Yes.
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Variety of dogs’ coats explained ; Yes, and she includes that wolf  genes got study, too.
• Bloomberg News – Elizabeth Lopatto: Bo Obama’s Fur Coat Is Three Genes Away From Wolf Ancestors’ ; Yes, and in here is an explanation not seen in most other accounts: the bushy eyebrows and moustaches on some dogs. The scientists call these “furnishings.”
• Thaindian/ANI: Why Obama’s pet pooch has curly hair;  Yes. But this is a straight, mild rewrite of the Univ. of Utah press release (see Grist below).

Grist for the Mill:

NIH Press Release ; University of Utah Press Release ;

One has to guess that pelt color and spottiness is a whole ‘nother thing. And the variety of ways that dog hair varies in length, just in one dog, goes beyond eyebrows and moustaches, doesn’t it. So additional factors must determine how much and where the genes are expressed.

-CP

Sailors and scientists who have spent a few weeks looking for the plastic-littered sump of trash caught in a monster eddy  northeast of Hawaii  held a press conference yesterday in La Jolla, near San Diego and home of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They said, in essence, there sure is a lot of junk out there. No real science to report yet – that’ll come from weeks or months of analysis of samples and laboratory experiments with various pelagic ocean organisms. But it is a story and the press turned out.

   First off, before getting to the bigger bruisers, the little La Jolla Light sent its Research Roundup Columnist Lynne Friedmann to view some of the sampled trash. And yes, to members of the US’s National Assoc. of Science Writers reading this post, this is OUR Lynne, editor of the ScienceWriters newsletter, displaying her chops.  The column even has her picture, Q.E.D. Lynne’s work also appears in the Del Mar Times. Hers is a  clean, and evocative account of the “displays of plastic bottles, buckets, ropes, and tangled nets” that the Scripps team collected for dramatic effect at the press conference – while explaining that most of trash, and most worrisome, is the myriad smaller bits more likely to make life hard for birds, fish, and other creatures that swallow them.

Other stories:

• San Diego Union-Tribune – Mike Lee: Researchers return from garbage patch with sample ; While most everybody calls it merely the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, Lee amps that up even more: it’s “a Texas-size vortex of plastic trash.” A vortex of trash. That’s vivid, even if it is in actuality a slowly-turning gyre in which, most places, one must trawl a net to get the little bitty pieces that prove something is amiss. His story also provides news that, partly because of enormous public interest,  in 2011 a followup expedition to another garbage gyre in the South Pacific is in the works. And, the vivid pic to the right proving that it’s not ALL confetti-sized decomposing plastic shards.  
• KPBS (NPR affiliate) Ed Joyce: Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch May Be Killing Marine Life ; Dunno if Joyce wrote that hed. But it’s lazy and could have been on a story anytime in the last few years. Call me old-fashioned, but a head line ought to have an inkling of what’s new – and in this case, it’s the trash that the expedition hauled back to the lab. Also: Radio clip and interview from the morning show with Dwane Brown and Alan Ray: Scripps Scienitsts Exploring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
• San Diego News Network – Kelen Kaio Chang : ‘Shocking’ amount of plastic pollutes oceans / Scripps scientists find pervasive levels of plastic debris during 20-day research trip ; Nice job – full of detail such as the toy stuffed dog with a barnacle growing near its left eye and that the crew named “Lucky” - but it raises a question. Several outlets as well as this one reported that out of 100 net hauls in the zone, 100 came up with at least some plastic. Fine – but for perspective, what’s the batting average elsewhere in the Pacific?
• AP – Michelle Rindels: Pacific Ocean garbage patch worries researchers ;
• Reuters - Steve Gorman: Plastics patch found across 1,700 miles of Pacific ; He includes that cleanup will be difficult. Hmm. Is cleanup across millions of square miles of ocean in anybody’s play book?
• Los Angeles Times (Greenspace blog) – Betina Boxall: The plastic sea ; Is too bad it’s not a story for the home edition.

Grist for the Mill:

Scripps Inst. of Oceanography SEAPLEX project ; Nat’l Science Foundation Press Release ;

-CP